is this possible..?

Virdi

Virdi

Virdi

Soldato
Joined
11 Jun 2004
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Location
Middlesex, London
Hello all,

My friend would like to connect a USB Hard Drive to two Computer's at the same time... One PC and one Mac

is this possible please?

Thanks
 
I'm not sure but I wouldn't have thought so, as far as I am aware USB was not designed to take multiple inputs at the same time which I'd guess will mess with the data storage and queueing if you can even find a hard drive that will accept multiple USB inputs.

I've got nothing to base this on really so wait for confirmation. :)
 
Could get one with both usb2 and 1394 and connect to both but not sure what would happen if you try AXX at same time.

But it would work in that you could both use it without unplugging/plugging in every time.
 
You don't want to plug it into two things at once, else there's nothing controlling the writes. If both computers write at the same time, you've got corruption...

Get a NAS :)
 
Virdi said:
Yep - I did think about NAS - But it's not gonna be as quick as USB or Firewire
Click to expand...

Again I could be wrong about this but assuming the transfer rate of an ordinary NAS is that of standard 100mb/s LAN you won't be getting too near maxing it since even the fastest drives stuggle to get much above 80mb/s sustained. Also network connections are better for sustained transfer than something like USB2 which has a high burst speed but then drops off fairly significantly.
 
The 100mbps quoted for LAN speed is 100 megabits per second whereas the 80MB/s is 80 megabytes per second so the LAN will severely throttle the disk. There are some gigabit NAS available although even they seem to struggle to match USB2 for speeds (and will require either a direct connection to the PC or a gigabit switch).
 
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